It's not every day you come across a bona fide Catch 22, but Nosemonkey has spotted one facing the EU. Europeans are hostile to instutions that arrogantly assume consent and dictate progress from the top down. But the institutions can't now engage with Europeans without reform implemented from the top down - as was the goal of the Constitution. Steps that are taken to close the democratic deficit serve to confirm the existence of a democratic deficit. Ouch.
A useful summary of what other people have said lives chez Robin.
The Observer blog meanwhile is struggling with another post-referendum question. How long are we going to cling to Left and Right as poles in a system of classification? As the events of this week confirm, they are worse than useless for describing the modern constellation of political views.
As has been widely observed the far left and far right in France were united in hostility to the EU. Opposition on the nationalist fringe is simple enough, and reflects Britain's brand of euroscepticism - glorious nation's interests subverted by conspiracy of 'others'.
The left opposition is a bit trickier to grasp because the view of the EU as liberal economic conspiracy to crowbar markets open for ravaging by international capital just doesn't resonate here. Not when you see things from the other side of a Thatcherite revolution. Even a Gordon Brown would want the EU to deregulate and liberalise more than envisaged in the now moribund European Constitution. So is Jacques Chirac seeking refuge in protectionism and state exceptionalism a move to the left or to the right?
'Left' and 'Right' in Europe are becoming as loose confederations of views as the parties in the US. The Republicans harbour radical free marketeers, libertarians and nationalists of a religious moral flavour and the Democrats include moderate free marketeers, social liberals and nationalists of an economic protectionist flavour. (Not that that stops them calling each other 'left' and 'right'.)
A key difference between the continents is that evangelical Christianity is a unifying belief for the right in the US and Marxism remains a much more relevant creed for the left in Europe. As an aside I wonder if there is a comparison to be made between the two? Doctrines that have theoretical aspirations to be universal but that have run out of globalising momentum and will now be shored up within the borders of nation states. There's another blog post in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, it is starting to look as though Europe's 'left' may have to be reconciled with the fact that some form of moderate liberal market capitalism is the only game in town preaching internationalism with a human face. If Tony Blair hadn't squandered his credibility on the domestic and world stages with an unpopular war this might have been his finest hour.
